Reflecting on the achievements and failures of close friends and colleagues, and how the quality of his own efforts varied on his good and bad days, James observed: "Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources."

​William James continues,

“the human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.”

“Of course there are limits,” James acknowledged. “The trees don’t grow into the sky.” But these outer boundaries of where we will, eventually, stop improving are simply irrelevant for the vast majority of us: “The plain fact remains that men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.

​

When you notice a trend, you do so for several reasons: It might indicate what stocks to buy. It might indicate what businesses to start. And for every one trend there are many different businesses you can start. If it’s a negative trend, it might suggest how you can position your family to survive. It gives you something to talk about with your friends. It gives you ideas that may morph into revenue streams that nobody has ever thought of before.

Most of the trends I’ll discuss are based on two important ideas: All things end, and the better we prepare for that end, the more our legacies will just be beginning. Innovation takes place nonstop. Humans didn’t innovate for 2 million years, and then suddenly, with the arrival of the printing press, we began to innovate at faster and faster rates. Every year the level of innovation is higher than that of the year before.

So despite my general reservations about stock investing, I invest in companies that diagnose cancer. I invest in companies that I think can diagnose Alzheimer’s. I don’t like to invest in the cures but I like to invest in the diagnostics. I stay away from the cures because the FDA charges you $2 billion to test your cure and then they still might reject you, which doesn’t seem very fair.

There are many opportunities in the tech workforce space, including: Buying up stocks of employment firms that are getting more and more technologically savvy about helping to place employees, deal with healthcare issues, etc. Getting involved in companies that are being used to rehire the new temp workforce in ways they’ve never been hired before.

Trend Example: Chemistry 


Alcoa has made aluminum the same way since the late 19th century. Their profits are razor thin because everyone knows the aluminum manufacturing process and anyone can supply the appropriate chemicals and metals at just the right price.

However, this is going to change and someone is going to find a new way to make aluminum. They might discover new elements to use and new processes to smelt. Companies that hoard those elements or develop those new processes will benefit in a big way. Chemistry is going to be much more influential in the coming ten to twenty years than information technology.

Keep track of the changes in how people are innovating in chemistry and suddenly you will see what’s happening in alternative energy, battery storage, isolation of valuable chemical isotopes (like pure oxygen, for instance), etc. How do you make money on this? Read about it, keep an eye on the companies and markets involved, and you will see the right moment to place your bets. Just like the biotech markets, the chemistry space is difficult to value but the markets are huge, even in the trillions.


The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth

I love meeting new people. I’ve always done a good job with the initial skills involved with meeting new people. I feel like I can meet anyone in the world that I want to. Whether I make use of that meeting is another story (I’ll expand on the importance of following up later).

You build a network by: Introducing people to others who can provide value for them. Make sure it’s “permission networking” (you get permission from both sides first. Otherwise, you are a burden and not a help). Introducing people to ideas without any expectation of receiving something back. This means you have to get good at coming up with ideas. Finding a meaningful connection between you and the other person. A connection that person might value. Lewis Howes contacted many former athletes. Sometimes people use their hometowns or schools. Sometimes people use mutual friends, etc.

Eight Skills You Need to Become a Super-Connector

1. Introduce two other connectors. If you can introduce two people who are themselves great connectors, then you become a meta-connector. They will meet and get along, since connectors get along with one another for two reasons: they are naturally friendly people (hence their ability to connect so easily with people) and they have a lot of friends in common almost by definition.

2. Introduce two people, but this time with a specific idea in mind. Marsha, meet Cindy. Cindy, meet Marsha. Marsha, you are the best book editor in the world. Cindy, your book is the best book idea I have ever heard. You both can make money together. No need to “cc” me. If you can help two other people make money, then eventually good things will happen to you. In a few cases, I’ve been able to do this. They’re rare, but it’s happened.

3. Host a dinner of interesting people. I’ve only done this twice. When the last Star Wars prequel came out I invited people from every aspect of my life (friends, hedge fund investors, writers) to a dinner, I got everyone movie tickets, and it was a fun night. I solidified my relationships with some of my investors, plus some of the funds I was invested in, and I managed to connect people who later did business together.

4. Follow up. This is the hardest part for me. I have a five-year-old list of people who introduced me to people I actually wanted to be introduced to and then I never followed up. For instance, a few months ago I wrote a post called “Burton Silverman, are you dead yet??” Burton Silverman is one of my favorite artists. I wanted to know if he was dead to see if the value of one of his paintings had gone up. He wrote me to tell me he wasn’t dead yet. And as I type this, his studio is only a few blocks away. I could visit him right now if I want. Except for some reason I never returned his e-mail. He’s on my list. But following up is the hardest part for me. Then I put it off until I start to feel guilty about not following up. So then I push back the follow-up even more.

5. Reestablish contact. The other day I was following my own advice. I wrote an e-mail to an ex-investor of mine from 2004, saying sincerely how grateful I was he invested with me and I always enjoyed his advice and friendship. He immediately wrote back (because, unlike me, he’s a good connector and businessman) and said, “What are you up to? Here’s what I’m doing. Maybe we can work together again.” This was six years after I’d last spoken to him.

6. Show up. I don’t know which rule on this list is the most valuable. But if a good connector invites you to a dinner or a meeting, then the best thing you can do is show up.

7. Interview people. Back to Michael Ellsberg, who did something genius. He figured he wanted to meet a lot of successful people, sort of the way Napoleon Hill did when he wrote his famous best-seller Think and Grow Rich. So Ellsberg got himself a book deal about how millionaires are educated and then, book deal in hand, he interviewed as many millionaires and billionaires as he could find. The guy is now a mega-connector. When I met him a few weeks ago, he had nonstop ideas about how one goes about meeting people.

8. Produce something of value. In order to connect two people, you must have people to connect. You have to meet them in the first place, and the best way to do that is to produce something of value. I tell a story where I describe how when I was broke and about to go homeless I tried a technique of just reaching out to people. I would write letters like, “Hey, would love to meet.” Unfortunately, that never worked. People are busy. Nobody wanted to meet some random guy like me.

So instead I tried a new technique. I would spend time researching the business of each person I wanted to meet and come up with ten ideas to help them that I would give them completely for free. I gave one guy, Jim Cramer, ten article ideas he should write. He ultimately wrote back, “You should write these”—which started my financial writing career. It also led to a habit of exchanging ideas with people at TheStreet that ultimately led to me selling Stockpickr to them. Another guy to whom I gave several trading system ideas ultimately allocated money for me to trade. This started my hedge fund trading career. Once I started concentrating on producing something of value—without worrying about what I would get out of it—it started coming back to me. Pretty amazing, huh?


The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth

You don’t need to be leading anyone. Before I can lead anyone I have to lead myself. I have to read. I have to try and improve one percent a week. I have a handful of interests and I have a lot of experience. I have to get better at the things I’m interested in. I have to understand more deeply the painful experiences I’ve had. I have to every day practice the health—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual—that I suggest to everyone else. Sometimes I don’t. And I feel it. But that’s OK. Don’t regret. Today is a new day. Today is the only day.


The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth

Tomorrow is 100 percent based on the negotiations you do today. 


Constantly study yourself, the negotiations you’ve done, and try to improve so you don’t experience the terrible effects of bad negotiations.

One key point to remember;

Make Sure Your List is Bigger Than Theirs 


Let’s say you are negotiating a book advance. They offer a $10,000 advance and they can’t budge higher. That’s fine. Now make your list of other things: how much social media marketing will they do? What bookstores will they get you into? Who has control over book design? What percentage of foreign rights, of digital rights, can you get? Do royalties go up after a certain number of copies are sold? Will they pay for better book placement in key stores? Will they hire a publicist? And so on.

Make a list before every negotiation. Make the list as long as possible. If your list is bigger than theirs (size matters), then you can give up “the nickels for the dimes.” This is not just about negotiation. This is to make sure that later you are not disappointed because there is something you forgot. Always prepare. Then you can have faith that because you prepared well, the outcome will also go well.

Make sure you know all of your numbers. All of your lists of wants. All of the other side’s numbers. All similar deals in your industry. All similar deals that the other negotiator has done. As many examples of negotiation, particularly in this arena, that you can find.

Then make sure you are negotiating from a position of strength. People usually think that means, “I have more power than you.” But this is not what strength is. That will only result in a bad negotiation that will satisfy nobody in the long run. Strength simply means physical health (you’re well slept, you’ve eaten well, you feel energy), emotional health (you are dealing with people you like), mental health (you have done your preparation), and spiritual health (you feel fully deserving of the abundance and gratitude that is coming your way).

Having faith in your strength is all you need to bring to the table. Nothing else. Once you do your preparation, have faith that the right negotiation will happen.


The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth

Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.

You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.

failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

But in the process I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn’t yet know it.

I asked what he did for a living and he told me he was CEO of a company that made screws. Then he offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one.

For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process. This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are the best job for you won’t become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.

This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal.

In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways. To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time.

All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power.

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system.

If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.

The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not.


How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

Being a leader doesn’t mean you are the guy who runs things. Being a leader doesn’t mean you created something or you did something great in the past or some other person has given you any kind of authority. Being a leader happens right now, today. It’s something you can do without money, without authority, and without anybody. But first, you have to lead yourself. It’s a mind-set.

Desire More Success for Others Than for Yourself 

Most important by far is that you be able to care about others’ success more than your own. Everyone around you needs to ultimately become better than you. That’s how you lead. The light is in front of you and you take them to the light and then go back.

Say “Yes, and…” I just wrote a book called The Power of No. Buy it because your life will be better (and I am not ashamed of plugging it). But now I’m about to tell you to say yes.

Constructive criticism works like this: You say, “Yes, and…” List what’s good about the person’s idea. Describe how you would improve it even more.

Figure out the vision that is the base of the idea that you are talking about. Connect the “why” of what you are suggesting to the initial vision. Does it work better than the initial idea? Always be open to the fact that you might be wrong.

Show Gratitude 

Yesterday I was talking to Lewis Howes, an athlete turned multimillion-dollar webinar and LinkedIn expert who was on my podcast a few months ago. Lewis told me that his outgoing voice mail says, “Before you leave me a message, tell me one thing you are grateful for.” He says the messages people leave blow him away.

Follow The “30-150” Rule (AKA The Vision Rule) An organization with less than thirty people is a tribe. There is evidence from 70,000 years ago that if a tribe got bigger than thirty people, it would split into two tribes. A tribe is like a family—that is, you learn personally whom to trust and not to trust. You learn to care for their individual problems. You know everything about the people in your tribe. Having just thirty people in the tribe allows a leader to spend time with each person in the tribe and to listen to their issues.

Be OK with Change 

Everyone has pain they don’t want to feel. For instance, I might feel pain if someone makes fun of my looks. I used to feel pain if someone questioned my net worth, which I equated with self-worth. If I’m a CEO, I might have pain if the “numbers” go down.

A leader is always prepared for change, and realizes that pain is just an opportunity to live in a bigger and more abundant world. This is the secret that most people forget when they build their brick houses and hide inside from the outside world so pain doesn’t seek them out.

Know The Importance of Dignity

If I don’t treat my own projects with respect, then how can I expect others to? If I don’t treat myself with dignity, then how can I expect the people around me to treat me, or even one another, with dignity?

Know There’s Always a Good Reason and a Real Reason for Everything, and Share It 

When you are a leader, people come to you with problems every day. The problems are usually very good problems. “The client is asking for too much.” Or “Jill didn’t do her job right,” or “My car broke down.”

A leader listens to the good reason closely to try and figure out what the real reason is, and then comes up with a solution. And there is always a real reason. Listen for that and see if you can help. A good solution solves one problem. A real solution solves a hundred problems.

Care About Your Health 

A sick leader is not a great leader. A leader who is spending time with people not good for them is not a good leader. A leader who doesn’t constantly practice creativity is not a good leader. A leader who is not grateful for the abundance already in his or her life will never lead his vision into abundance. He won’t know how.
There’s no such thing as instant health. There’s only such thing as practice and progress. All you have to do is check the box on progress. Progress compounds every day into enormous abundance.

Love What You Do

Don’t do something just for the money. Money is a side effect of persistence. You persist in things you are interested in. Explore your interests. Then persist. Then enjoy all the side effects.

Know How To Lead Yourself 

You don’t need to be leading anyone. Before I can lead anyone I have to lead myself. I have to read. I have to try and improve one percent a week. I have a handful of interests and I have a lot of experience. I have to get better at the things I’m interested in. I have to understand more deeply the painful experiences I’ve had. I have to every day practice the health—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual—that I suggest to everyone else. Sometimes I don’t. And I feel it. But that’s OK. Don’t regret. Today is a new day. Today is the only day.


The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth

By and large you are what you do. At least in terms of your identity being externally expressed, what you do defines who you are to those around you in a big way. Conversely, if what you are doing now does not feel like an accurate representation of who you are and what you want to be, then it’s time to focus on acting more in-line with how you feel inside and beginning to update some of your internal identity drivers to support a more accurate external expression through your actions day to day.

If you can dream and not make dreams your master; If you can think and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with triumph and disaster; And treat those two impostors just the same,


If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the earth and everything that is in it, And, what is more, you’ll be a man, my son. — Rudyard Kipling

Thoughts are discrete packets of energy that flow from your belief system and are the precursor to all conscious action. As those thoughts move from the formless realm of the mind to impact the world we live in they are felt as emotions, or energy in motion.

“Just as no one can be forced into a belief, No one can be forced to unbelieve.” — Sigmund Freud

Creative Constructs are temporary lifestyle changes that draw on your interests and passions to shuffle the deck in the game of life. Whether this means traveling for the summer, living abroad for half a year, participating in an intensive learning program or going off the grid and working on an organic farm for a season, creative constructs are an integral part of a dream lifestyle. Creative Constructs consist of setting parameters that let you work, learn and play; meet new people, relax and have an experience that is long enough to be meaningful, but not so long that you’re committing to a whole different lifestyle long-term or indefinitely.

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in The World

It’s now your responsibility to take charge of your own self-concept and your beliefs. You must choose to believe that you can do anything you set your mind to—anything at all—because, in fact, you can. It might help you to know that the latest brain research now indicates that with enough positive self-talk and positive visualization combined with the proper training, coaching, and practice, anyone can learn to do almost anything.

If you assume in favor of yourself and act as if it is possible, then you will do the things that are necessary to bring about the result. If you believe it is impossible, you will not do what is necessary, and you will not produce the result. Either way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done. 
HENRY FORD

The words I can’t actually disempower you. They actually make you weaker when you say them. In my seminars, I use a technique called applied kinesiology to test people’s muscle strength as they say different phrases. I have them put their left arm out to their side, and I push down on it with my left hand to see what their normal strength is. Then I have them chose something they think they can’t do, such as I can’t play the piano, and say it out loud. I then push down on their arm again. It is always weaker. Then I have them say, “I can do it” (I can play the piano), and their arm is stronger.

You need to base your decisions about what you want to do on your goals and desires—not the goals, desires, opinions, and judgments of your parents, friends, spouse, children, and coworkers. Quit worrying what other people think about you and follow your heart.


The Success Principles(TM) - 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

One of the main reasons why most people don’t get what they want is they haven’t decided what they want. They haven’t defined their desires in clear and compelling detail.

So how do you reclaim yourself and your true desires? How do you get back to what you really want with no fear, shame, or inhibition? How do you reconnect with your real passion? You start on the smallest level by honoring your preferences in every situation—no matter how large or small. Don’t think of them as petty. They might be inconsequential to someone else, but they are not to you.

If you are going to reown your power and get what you really want out of life, you will have to stop saying, “I don’t know; I don’t care; it doesn’t matter to me”—or the current favorite of teenagers, “Whatever.” When you are confronted with a choice, no matter how small or insignificant, act as if you have a preference.

Ask yourself, If I did know, what would it be? If I did care, which would I prefer? If it did matter, what would I rather do?

Not being clear about what you want and making other people’s needs and desires more important than your own is simply a habit. You can break it by practicing the opposite habit.

One of the easiest ways to begin clarifying what you truly want is to make a list of 30 things you want to do, 30 things you want to have, and 30 things you want to be before you die. 


This is a great way to get the ball rolling.


The Success Principles(TM) - 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be